Submissions:2024/10 years of Toolforge
This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2024.
Title:
- 10 years of Toolforge
Type of session:
- Indepth Session (30-60 min)
Session theme(s):
- Community Health, Governance & Strategy, Technology
Abstract:
Toolforge is the shared hosting platform run by the Wikimedia Foundation for community and staff to operate bots and web tools that are used by contributors, readers and the general public. Some tools are very well known and receive a lot of traffic (e.g. Earwig's copyvio detector) and others are incredibly niche that only a few people even know about.
We are coming up on, give or take, the 10 year anniversary of the shutdown of its predecessor, the Toolserver, operated by Wikimedia Deutschland. As someone who has been closely involved in this project as both a volunteer and staff for all of those years, this offers us a good checkpoint to reflect on the past 10ish years of Toolforge, by celebrating successes and acknowledging missed opportunities.
We'll examine Toolforge from three different lenses:
- Platform: how Toolforge provides a service for the benefit of other Wikimedia projects
- Governance: tool hosting transitioned from WMDE to WMF, and then efforts to give the community more power
- Project: Toolforge is (maybe) a Wikimedia sibling project in its own right, how does it contribute to spreading free knowledge?
This talk focuses on a technical platform and will discuss technical matters, but will ensure it's reasonably accessible to a non-technical audience.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- Legoktm
E-mail address:
- legoktm
debian.org
Affiliated organization(s):
- Wikimedia New York City
Estimated length of session
- 45-50 minutes (can shorten if needed)
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- no
Special requests:
- Slides are available at File:10 years of Toolforge.pdf